Steven Spielberg’s new film War Horse is almost deliberately old-fashioned, pitting noble beast against the horrors of war, with sweeping, emotional setpieces — and dividing critics as Hollywood’s awards season looms.
The movie, which got a Golden Globe nomination this month ahead of its Christmas Day release in the United States, is even made on good old celluloid in a snub to the digital revolution.
“I think that movies like that don’t get made much anymore, you know the kind of epic sweeping historical drama that were used to be made quite a bit 30, 40 years ago,” producer Kathleen Kennedy said. “It’s what makes the movie a little old-fashioned but at the same time modern,” she added.
The movie tells the story of Joey, a horse raised amid a bucolic English countryside who is torn away from his home — and stable lad Albert — and sent to France to the battlefields of World War I.
To a soundtrack heavy on violins, the moviegoer is swept into the epic struggle Albert has in finding his equine partner amid the blood, mud and misery of the Great War.
“World War I was the last hurrah for the horse (in) warfare,” three-times Oscar winner Spielberg — who also has his 3-D Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn out for the holidays — told industry daily Variety.
“It was a time when the technological revolution, mainly in the implementation of new technologies to kill more efficiently and more cruelly, were supplanting the usefulness of the horse, which had brought terror into the hearts of standing armies for centuries,” Spielberg said. “And after World War I, that was over and the horse went back to a more bucolic and sane way of life. So it’s really more of a story about courage and connections and less of a story about combat.” War Horse, which is on the shortlist for the best dramatic film Golden Globe, is based on a 1982 children’s book by British writer Michael Morpurgo.